Making New Friends

Long time no post on this blog. Life has a habit of taking over, with family matters to deal with and plenty to do, One distraction has been my dear old Dad, who crashed his mobility scooter (going too fast) and broke his femur. Bloody Campbells!! I've simply not spent the time to keep things up to date here.

What have we been up to? Quite a lot!

Money has continued to be tight, so we've stuck to the plan to focus on things that were of the highest import for moving things on.

Rather than spend money on running the car, we've been concentrating on improving the chassis and getting a proper handle on the performance and manipulation of the rocket motors. There has been quite some interest in the rocket motor technology for applications other than going fast on four wheels.

Trouble with these space-rocket folk – they want hard numbers – performance data. We simply have never had the facility to do proper measurement of thrust, flow-rates, chamber pressure and stuff that the scientists need to know. After putting our toe into the strange world of space technology, meeting a few very talented and interesting people and attending a couple of events, we've made some very useful new friends.

James Macfarlane, M.D. of 'Airborne Engineering', and his team at Westcott, have turned out to be a really worthwhile discovery. James has a fantastic facility with fully instrumented testing bays, a well equipped workshop on site and a huge background knowledge and data-base relating to all kinds of rocket motors. He also happens to be a lovely guy, who is patient teacher, with a passion and enthusiasm that is quite infectious. James has a very rigorous and objective approach, which is a good balance to our energy and enthusiasm.

In between conducting testing for companies such as 'Reaction Engines', James has donated time and facilities for testing our systems and collecting the data we need. We have already had one initial day of testing, where we were able to match our systems and testing rig to his rig and instrumentation and to fire a rocket successfully. The rocket we fired was a pretty mild set-up with a small injector, it ran well and gave us some excellent base-line data for further testing. Last week we returned and conducted two further tests. Each rocket was identical to the first test, but each had a progressively larger N2O injector. These were relatively short firings, we'll investigate potential duration at a later date. These firings went very well, with performance conforming to James' predictions and will the usual flat curves for thrust and chamber pressure. Thrust levels and were very good. We think we've arrived at the set-up required for the car.

There was no damage to any part of the rockets.

We are not going to release this data to the general public, I'm afraid, as we have reached a point where we do have to start looking after our intellectual property. Suffice to say, it does appear that we can indeed get these motors to do exactly what is need for the car to fulfil it's potential.

We have also been struggling with castors! The car has a turning radius of an oil-tanker, and is twenty five feet long. So we developed dollies to under her to allow manoeuvring in tight spots (such as getting her out of the workshop!) We've never made them run smoothly and steer easily. It turns out that castors are very subtle bits of simple engineering.

We needed expertise. It arrived in the form of Tim Murrow at 'Bil Material Handling'. I made an enquiry about wheels for our dollies, after doing a bit of 'googling'. We were just looking to buy some of their obviously excellent and strong wheels. When I told Tim what we wanted them for, 'Bil' immediately offered to supply the wheels at no charge. The wheels are great - they glide along like silk. Unfortunately our home-built castors, in which we installed them,, still are very hard to steer. Tim came back with an offer to have their experts review the situation and sort it out for us – again at no charge. Brilliant! What a great company!

We sent them a couple of pics for their company newsletter, they sent us some 'Bil' graphics to go on the car, and now they've offered some very welcome financial support. You just never know when or where your going to run into the right kind of people.

The car will now be on display at their headquarters in Calne in Wiltshire in the 13th of September.